


the moon-pale maiden

by tactfulGnostalgic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence (Probably), Arranged Marriage, Gen, Mentions of Rape, Post-Canon, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 07:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11984973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: Sansa Lannister is a child, stolen from her family, robbed of her birthright by a lion and a scarlet cloak.Sansa Bolton is a survivor, sent into battle with no weapon but herself, traded for a bastard’s claim to her home.Sansa Arryn is Lady of the Eyrie and the Vale, and a summer child no more.





	the moon-pale maiden

**Author's Note:**

> I took some liberties with characters like Harrold Hardyng. Perhaps he's nicer in the books.

They don’t get an accurate estimate of the death toll until about a year after the fighting ends. It settles somewhere in the millions, all told, although some of the Maesters debated whether to count Walker casualties in the figures. (“You can’t die twice,” she remembers one insisting, and it was the kind of trivial bickering that would have disgusted Father, if they would have even dared to say it, around him. She believes they wouldn’t.) 

But they will never really how many died, for the dead are faceless; either Wildlings, who could not be marked on a census, or low folk, with no families to remember them by. Those are always the first to die in wars. Among those she knows, the war takes Davos Seaworth, Sandor Clegane, Beric Dondarrion, and Jaime Lannister. Nobody can say how any of them died, although it’s not hard to guess — only that when everything ended, none of them came home. 

Jon comes back to her atop a dragon, and when she sees its green scales glittering in the white winter sun, she cries with a joy she thought herself incapable of. 

“We won,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like victory. It sounds like a king pulling himself together and preparing to count his dead, to apologize to the lords whose sons didn’t come home and tell their widows what the war had made of them. His beard is long and his limbs are thinner.

She marches up to the giant lizard and hauls him off its back herself, wrapping him in a hug that nearly bars him from breathing. 

“You’re alive,” she says.

“We lost Drogon,” he says. “He died killing Viserion. It was the last thing he did. Daenerys is still up at the Wall, trying to settle things with the Wildlings. She wants to get them to respect her claim, before heading South.” 

“You’re alive,” she repeats.

(Sansa Stark learned a long time ago that the people who live longest in this world are the selfish and the cruel. She is not cruel.) 

(When both her brother and her sister walk off the battlefield more or less intact, she allows herself to be ecstatic, to be gleeful, despite the horrors that surround them.)

Arya disappears immediately after the war ends, without once showing her face at Winterfell. Sansa knows that this doesn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t _there._ Jon assures her that she survived the final battle — he escorted her to Castle Black himself, and last he saw her, she was going to bed for a well-deserved rest. Neither of them see Arya again for a very long time. 

(A week later, Cersei Lannister is found dead in her private quarters, a dagger driven through her chest.)

***

Even with a third of the firepower she once possessed, one dragon is more than enough for Daenerys to take a headless and anarchic King’s Landing without resistance. The smallfolk take one look at Rhaegal’s snarling face and the wild, war-hardened expression of a woman who has just lost her second child, and they practically throw the crown at her head. 

***

Sansa Stark remains in Winterfell, where goes to sleep each evening a little less afraid that someone will touch her in the night. 

***

She wakes up one morning and realizes she cannot remember Robb’s face. She tells Jon, fighting tears, and he hugs her, and whispers aphorisms in his gruff Northern accent, and she can almost forget. She asks him to tell the story of the War of Five Kings, tell it like it should have been told to her — by a Northerner, by someone who understood the war’s importance — and he does, in stilted, uncomfortable sentences, cobbling together a history for the last surviving Starks to remember. 

***

“I’m her nephew,” Jon whispers, and Sansa drops her quill.

“What,” she says.

***

“All right,” she says, rubbing her forehead. “You’re — you’re heir to the Iron Throne. Jon. You’re the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms.” 

“Aegon,” he says, apologetically. “Lyanna she — she named me Aegon.” 

“Aegon?” She pauses. “Rhaegar already had a son named Aegon.” 

Jon’s mouth twists like he’s trying to swallow a stone. “Somehow,” he says, tone lilting in a self-deprecating way, “I get the feeling that Rhaegar didn’t favor his Dornish children.” 

Sansa’s barks a very unladylike laugh at a very unladylike joke. She thinks she can be forgiven, under the circumstances.

“All right,” she says. “So Daenerys — Her Grace, I mean — she must be unhappy. Your claim’s stronger than hers. You’re a son of the heir. She’s only got a claim if all the sons of the Targaryen line are dead.” A stroke of fear lances through her heart. “She’ll make you take the Black,” she realizes. “If she doesn’t kill you, that is. Jon — you have to run. Targaryen, Baratheon, Lannister, they’re all the same; if they think someone’s a threat, they _destroy them.”_ She’s shaking. “You have to — you have to run. You have to go East. They won’t recognize you, there. You have to —”

“Sansa,” he says, patting her hand. “It’s all right. She won’t kill me.” 

“You don’t know them like I do,” she hisses. “You don’t know what queens do, Jon, I’m sorry, but you _don’t._ King’s Landing is a _pit,_ and it’s full of animals who all tear each other to pieces in order to sit atop the body pile, and I know you think she’ll give you mercy, but you _can’t_ make that mistake, you can’t be as stupid as Father or Robb —”

“Sansa,” he says, sounding inordinately not-offended at the invocation of their family’s deaths and the insult to his judgement. Instead, he sounds uneasy, somewhat anxious, and wholly embarrassed. “She won’t.”

“Why?” Sansa tears her hands and whirls on him. “What _possible_ guarantee could you have eked out of her that she would honor? You’ve already given her the North! She doesn’t need anything else from you!”

He knits his hands and closes his eyes, like a child confessing to an angry mother. 

“We’re getting married.” 

_“What,”_ she says. 

***

Months pass, and Arya does not reemerge. Bran remains cold, and the Northern lords remain anxious about her marriage prospects, about producing an heir to Winterfell. When she mentions it to Bran, he offers no innovative solution to the problem — only the observation that neither he nor Arya is likely to produce an heir anytime soon, and that she, as a woman in her prime, is the North’s best chance.

She understands this as much as she hates it. 

Letters come from all corners of the North, written by lords with poorly concealed craving for Winterfell, for power. She turns them all down. Finally, a raven arrives from the Eyrie, bearing a letter written in chicken-scratch and signed with clumsy, blockish print. 

Robin Arryn’s proposal is childishly worded but earnest, and she tosses it before the Northern lords like a kennel-keeper tossing a scrap of meat to her dogs. 

“It’s a good match,” her advisors plead. “An excellent match.”

“He won’t be a cruel husband,” Bran says, and although it is in all likelihood only a statement of fact, his reassurances warm her heart. 

Jon Snow only looks at her with his solemn eyes and says, “Only do it if you want to, Sansa,” and she wants to spit vile words at him, ask him what he understands of _wanting._

Instead, she says, “Are you marrying her because you want to?” And he turns bright red, which suggests there is something about honor and duty thrown in there, too, but he nods, and she believes him. One thing she likes about Jon Snow: he never lies, even when it would suit him to.

She has never, not once, married someone because she wanted to. She has not done a thing because she _wanted_ to do it in a while, and she does not think she will for a while longer.

The Northern lords are as happy to see her their leader as anyone else, regardless of her gender, but they will not be forever. With a Queen on the highest throne in the land, they will want a man to lead them. Sansa understands all this in a way that Jon Snow does not. She also understands (as Jon Snow does not) that with Bran Stark newly recovered from beyond the wall, her claim is not nearly as strong as it once was. And she has no desire to take from Bran what is his.

“I don’t want it,” he says, when she offers, and she’s tempted to box him about the ears. _Who let you choose what to want,_ she thinks, _why do you get to treat everything I’ve ever wanted like an ugly nameday present._

Aloud, she says, “I would advise against telling that to the Northern lords.” 

He gives her a sour look, and she smiles as brightly and insincerely as possible. She is tired of her brother playing at godhood, and she tires especially of his brittle nonchalance. She sees him flinch, and frown, and smile, and she knows that he feels things, even if they pale in comparison to how he once felt them. His dramatic declarations serve little purpose. 

“Where will you go?” he asks her.

“I’ll marry Robin Arryn,” she says. “I’ll go live in the Eyrie. I know the place — I’ll be a good lady to it, I think.”

“I thought you wanted Winterfell,” Bran says in surprise.

“I do,” she says. “I want peace more.”

Then she turns and goes inside.

***

She gets a new gown, of course, for the wedding — the Queen sends the fabric for it, bolts upon bolts of gleaming ivory-white satin, with silver threading along the edges. The seamstress spends nearly a full day poking at her atop a pedestal, taking measurements of body parts Sansa never considered relevant to the making of a dress, draping the heavy stuff over her shoulders and wrapping it around her waist so tightly it steals breath from her lungs. The dress that comes from it is a deep-necked ballgown, with plated shoulders and a train that spills out four yards behind her. It makes her skin look washed-out, she thinks, but her ladies come at her face with powders and rouges and berry juice for her lips, and they warm her complexion. At her own order, some of her hair is tied up in a circular knot, elaborate rows of braids twining into a wreath at the back of her head, the rest hanging free. She sends all but her Northern ladies out of the room for the doing of her hair. The wife’s knot is a tradition among Northern women, and Southern ladies know not — nor should they learn — how to do it. 

Her husband will not care. Her mother did not care, either, wearing her hair twisted into an elegant pile of Tully curls, looking for all her furs and blacks like a proper Riverlands girl. Sansa thinks her hair looks too much like her mother’s to suit the Northern style, a style created for windswept black curls, not heavy ginger waves. She tells her maid to tear it out, and tie it in a simple plait instead. The red sits down against the white of her gown like a streak of fire over a snow-field, or a bloody blade against a pale back.

The crown is heavy. Weeks ago, one was sent from King’s Landing — a gaudy, elaborate thing, an unfinished circle made by a double-headed dragon, jaws open, rubies glittering in the eyes. She sends it back. It is returned to her noteless, the dragons gone, replaced by snarling direwolves. 

This she sets over her braid before leaving her chambers. Her maids trail behind her, dressed in Stark blacks and greys, and when she walks out into the shade of the Godswood she lets Jon Snow take her hand and lead her to the Weirwood. She knows, in truth, that his name is neither Jon nor Snow. But she looks at him and sees in his old brown eyes a softness that will never belong to any Targaryen, and when he offers her a sad, sad smile she can see her father peering out of his bearded face. She has never called her brother Aegon, and she never will.

She thinks she could have called him Stark, if he had asked her to, if he had allowed her to. She almost wished it — she will never birth a Stark, nor Arya, and Bran’s death will finish Eddard’s line. But Jon will not steal Winterfell from her, and she regrets his kindness as much as she loves him for it. 

Robin Arryn shivers in the cold, despite his layered furs. He had not wanted to journey this far north for the wedding, but Sansa had insisted on marrying at Winterfell; she had decided, before accepting his offer, that it would be the last time she married, and she would have her final wedding in her home. 

She swears her vows numbly. She has long since lost faith in the meaning — _from this day until the end of my days,_ indeed — but Sweetrobin announces them so earnestly, with such seriousness, it lets her smile when he presses his clumsy lips to hers. There’s nothing lustful in the boy’s touch, nothing covetous in the way he lifts her hand to the assembly for their raucous approval. He is a child, still, and in his sickness he has never learned to look at girls the way other boys do. She might love him for that, but not as wives love their husbands. Sansa has never loved a man as wives love their husbands, and she thinks, now, she never will.

She expects this realization to bring sorrow, but there is only a pervasive, unsettling sense of relief. _Free,_ she thinks, despite the white cloth bound around her wrist. _Free_ , although a carriage to the Eyrie waits for her at Winterfell’s gates. _Free,_ even as her husband speaks eagerly of his new claim to the North, because now there will be no more letters from decrepit kings and their virile sons, no more disdainful looks from the Northern lords, no more gentle prodding from her advisors as they push marriage offers and speak hesitantly of the Vale.

Robin holds her hand throughout the feast, and she lets him. She smiles at him when he looks at her, and he smiles back, a toothy grin that crumples his face into a silly, lopsided expression. He tugs on her sleeve, and she leans down, baring her ear to him.

“Uncle Petyr gave Mother a wedding present when he wed her,” he says. She does not say so much as a word at the mention of his Uncle Petyr, does not stiffen, does not clench her jaw. It has been six weeks since Littlefinger’s death. She does not make a point of thinking of him. 

“Did he,” she says, cautious. 

“Yes. He gave her ten horses and two dresses and five necklaces, and a new longbow for me,” he announces. “He said that husbands must give nice things to their wives for their weddings.”

“And why would that be?”

Robin lifts his bleary eyes to hers in bemusement, as if it had never in his life occurred to him to wonder why a man did a thing. “To make them happy, I suppose,” he suggests, at length. It sounds like a question.

She nodded. “That’s probably it,” she says, trying to make her tone warm. “To make them happy.” 

“I’m going to make you happy,” Robin insists. “I’m going to make you even happier than Uncle Petyr made Aunt Lysa.” 

_That would not be difficult,_ she thinks, imagining the streak of her aunt’s red hair fluttering in free-fall.

“You are too kind, my love,” she says instead, and smiles. Robin beams, and for a moment, Sansa cannot help thinking of Margaery Tyrell, whispering sweet words into the ear of Tommen Baratheon, taking a boy’s bed to wear the crown.

Sansa is not as good as Margaery Tyrell. But Sansa is still alive.

She kisses the Sweetrobin’s cheek, and strokes his arm, and that night, when she tells him to forbid the bedding ceremony, he obeys her without a second thought. 

***

Robin Arryn is impotent. 

She learns this two months into their marriage, when he has not once reached for her, not once snuck his hand across their shared doublet to brush her bared skin. She learns this after hunting down Maester Colemon and performing the most infuriating cat-and-mouse interrogation she has ever facaded as a casual conversation, and threatening the man’s position not once, but twice. Thereafter, she takes her things, moves into the Dowager Queen’s former quarters, and visits her husband only while the sun rests in the sky. 

(Sansa Stark will not play at love with a boy who cannot give her heirs, nor will she offer herself without thought of reward.)

It is all the same; her sweet husband does not want her for her looks. He wants her for the pretty castles she makes out of snow, replications of the Eyrie, of the Red Keep, of Castle Black, even of Dragonstone, although never Winterfell. He wants her for the pretty Northern songs she sings after dinner, for the clever riddles she spins over tea, for the platonic kisses she presses to his forehead and cheeks, after the style of his mother. He wants her for the lemoncakes she brings to his study while his advisors are droning on about all the things he finds boring, for the hand she offers him when he has to judge a trial, and he wants her for the storybooks she brings him to read while she goes through letters addressed to Lord of the Vale. 

(Sansa Stark is better than Margaery Tyrell ever was.) 

She does not do it for herself alone. Under the rule of a boy-king, the Eyrie has decayed, knights starving and servants struggling to keep up with the workload. With her husband’s forged signature, the Lady of the Vale trades coin like the Iron Bank itself, swelling House Arryn’s coffers to comforting sizes in the dead of winter. She begins a steady stream of ravens to Winterfell, advising Bran on all the things he never had the chance to learn as a boy, and another flock ferry her letters to King’s Landing, where a man named Snow struggles to bear the heat of a dragon’s nest. 

(Sansa Stark survived four years in a den full of beasts who wanted her blood. Daenerys Targaryen on her worst day is nothing compared to Cersei Lannister on her best.) 

The servants learn to love her, their odd, cold Northern lady-queen. She speaks to them gently, firmly, and they blossom under her attentions. When she begins to murmur doubts about their lord’s capability, and her fears for the future of the Vale, they listen to her, and her whispers carry. A thousand voices cast her suggestions to all corners of the Eyrie, and if, the next time there is a housewide assembly, Robin is eyed with a little more pity, a little less respect — well, who is he to know the difference? 

The Lords of the Vale are a bigger problem — too honorable to reject entirely their Lord’s birthright, or to ignore Sansa’s history of unusual marriages, they are slow to accept her. She is glad of it. She is tired of men who can be bought with gold or sweet words, and happy to find that her realm’s protectors are made of sterner stuff.

It is, however, an annoyance. 

It takes her a year to win their faith. It is a year of acting as their lady, of slowly, naturally, revealing how much of the Vale is run by her hand alone. It is a year of choosing carefully when to lie, and how; it is a year of choosing her battles, of walking on ice. It is a year of calling the Vale’s bannermen’s wives to the Eyrie, regularly and often, to show them what she has done for their kingdom, to show them how deserving she is of their trust. 

(Sansa Stark does not invite their husbands to the Eyrie; she does not trust men to recognize power when it sits beside the throne, instead of on it. The women, however, see Sansa’s game immediately, and are glad enough to serve a ruler who has her mind intact and a working pair of lungs.) 

Robin Arryn falls in love with his wife. She does not do the same, but this is not to say she does not care for him. Often she finds herself falling into the character of Alayne again, around him, by force of habit. He needs nothing so much as a mother, and sometimes, when she lies in bed and hears him seizing, she feels a stab of guilt in her belly for having played a part in taking one from him. On those nights, she forgoes her vow of distance and enters the Lord’s chambers, bringing honey-milk and company. These are the few times in their marriage when she acts not for her own sake, nor for the sake of the Vale, but for him, her cousin, the boy born to her mother’s sister, blood of her blood.

But there are time she hates him, too. Once, a Knight whispers into the Lord’s ear of the things a husband and wife ought to be doing together, of what a Lord’s duty to his house entails, of a Lady’s womb and what it carries. That evening, Robin summons her to his chambers and throws a temper tantrum the likes of which she has not seen since her time as Alayne, screaming, frothing, threatening flight.

Sansa says nothing as he yells himself to exhaustion. When he tries to touch her, she strikes him across the face, pulls a dagger from her sleeve, and repeats something she heard the Hound once say to a man who stood in his way. 

She locks the door to the Lord of the Vale’s chambers from the outside. The dagger is tucked back into her sleeve. Sweetrobin wakes up surrounded by maesters and sweet, quiet, ladylike Sansa Arryn, who is terribly amused — as are the maesters, encouraged to laugh by her own unsuppressed giggles — by his dreams of a knife-wielding wife and threats of castration.

“Really, my love,” she says, “I’m sure I wouldn’t even know what to do with a dagger, if I had one.”

Robin frowns. “I was so sure,” he says, “I was so sure —”

“Perhaps some nightshade,” she suggests. “For dreamless sleep.”

“Nightshade,” Robin agrees, clearly uneasy, and for the rest of his life, she adds two drops of the herb to his evening wine. It makes him sluggish and bleary for the hours between supper and bed, and he never again makes mention of Sansa’s womb. 

The Knight who began the entire affair suffers a tragic accident only a week after speaking to his Lord. After getting drunk at Lord Arryn’s nameday feast, he decides to go for a nighttime walk near the Moondoor. Everyone knows how clumsy drunk men can be.

Sansa sheds tears for the dead knight. Often, and loudly.

***

Robin Arryn dies two years after their marriage. His maids find him lying in his bed, eyes glassy, and cold as stone; the Maesters say he had a seizure, choked on his own vomit in the night. Because they have been trained well, the first person to know is not Maester Colemon, or Harrold Hardyng, or any of the faithful officers of the Eyrie now left without a liegelord, but Sansa Stark, who takes the news without so much as a flinch.

She closes her eyes and breathes. Allows herself one, two, three seconds of unrestrained emotion, safe in the knowledge that her maids will interpret her silence as grief-stricken apoplexy.

One second for relief. Her last husband is dead. When Sansa put her hand in Robin Arryn’s, she decided it would be her final wedding, and she meant it. There will be no more men in Sansa’s bed, not now, not ever. She is the queen of two kingdoms, one by birth and one by marriage.

One second for regret. He was a child, Sweetrobin, even at the age when most boys would be clamoring to be called men, and he didn’t deserve death. He didn’t deserve to suffer as long as he did, or to have the mother he did. He did not deserve to have the Vale settled on his shoulders at his tender age, and he did not deserve to have Littlefinger plotting to steal it from him since before he was even born. She mourns the man he could have been, and she mourns the boy he was. 

One second for strength. She gathers her courage, and with the methodical pragmatism that her first two marriages taught her, assembles a list of adversaries in her mind: Robert Pryor, who had lost his daughter’s match with Robin to Littlefinger’s maneuvering. Uthor Tollett, who will blame her for House Arryn’s lack of an heir. Anya Waynwood, whose ward stands to inherit the Vale if Sansa does not. Harrold Hardyng, the heir presumptive around whom the aforementioned will rally. 

She opens her eyes. Petyr stands in the corner of the room, as clear as day. She does not scream, for she saw his throat open, and she knows why he is here. She has sometimes — not often — wished for him, wished for his way of looking at a situation, nudging one piece into place, and turning the whole game to his advantage. It is this, and not the man himself, that her mind has summoned in the wake of Robin’s death.

“Even the strongest man alive cannot live without a head,” he says, and disappears.

“Milady?” One of the maids kneels at her side, face all soft with sympathy. Sansa remembers herself, and closes her eyes tightly, crumpling her face. The pressure wets her eyes, and by blinking rapidly, she can make the tears fall. 

“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I — I just —”

“Of course, milady. Take a moment.”

She doesn’t need a moment. She needs a stack of paper, and five good ravens, and an audience with the lords of the Vale, and male heir of the Stark line. And, if she’s being earnest, a very tall glass of wine, for what she’s about to do will require it.

“Bring me the body,” she says instead. 

***

She summons all of the Eyrie with a scream that could split ears. They find her in her own bedroom, the body of her dearly departed husband strewn across their lady’s bed.

“We were together,” she explains, between wretched sobs, “last night — the strenuous activity, it was too much for his little heart — his sweet heart —”

The Maester — Colemon died of chill months ago, leaving in his place a man too young to grow a beard, with no knowledge of his lord’s potency — strokes her back and calls for some milk of the poppy to calm her. She brings the cup to her mouth, often and with shaking hands, but does not taste a drop. 

“Don’t worry,” he says, with all the lords of the Vale as their witness. “That kind of thing — well, it wasn’t his heart what was the problem, milady, an’ if it was, that kind of thing would’ve killed him long before now.” 

She wipes her eyes clear and bats them, bright and shining and innocent and blue. “No?”

“No. From my examination, milady, he choked. You had no part in it.” 

“Thank you, Maester. Your words are kind.”

The lords of the Vale do not care for her tears, or even, once they got over the shock of it, for their Lord’s death. They care for the words that came out of her mouth the instant the Maester arrived: _we were together._

Sansa considers rubbing her belly, but decides it would be too cliché. 

(Sansa Stark chooses her ladies-in-waiting with utmost care, and trusts them all to keep her secret. And those she does not trust completely, she plies with a trick learned from her first husband: it is a rare person who can be neither charmed nor bought.)

***

Harrold Hardyng was a boastful, swaggering youth and grew into a boastful, swaggering man. If he recognizes her as his betrothed Alayne from all those years ago, he does not suggest it, nor does he suggest reviving the arrangement for the sake of concord among the houses. 

_A stupid move,_ she hears Littlefinger whisper. _He doesn’t want to share the throne with his predecessor’s leftovers, but he doesn’t have the support to take it himself. He would have bent to you nicely._

When he comes strutting into the High Hall, his guard of knights in tow and his ugly checkered sigil flapping in the breeze from the open moon door, he finds her already sitting on the throne. 

“You kept it warm for me,” he laughs.

“Ser Hardyng,” she says evenly. “To what do we owe your gracious visit?”

He looks at her like she’s spat dragonfire. 

“To claim my seat,” he says, speaking as if to a child, “as Lord Paramount of the Vale. Lady Arryn.” 

“Oh,” she says. “I am very sorry, then, Ser Harding, to have wasted your time.” 

His face scrunches up with confusion. This seals Sansa’s decision; she could never hand over the Vale to someone incapable of hiding when they are lost. 

“You see,” she explains, “you are not Lord Paramount. Of the Vale, or any other kingdom.” 

“I am the heir to —”

“Is your name Harrold Arryn?”

It stops him short. His jaw clacks together, and red fury rises to his cheeks.

“No,” he says.

She leans back, wondering if the rich satisfaction in her chest was what Cersei felt, torturing her with innocent questions to which there were no innocent answers.

“And — correct me, Ser, if I am wrong — does the Vale not belong to House Arryn?”

He says nothing.

“Well, then,” she says. “Seeing as there is only one Arryn in this room, and they already sit the throne, there seems little reason to dwell on the matter.”

Harding’s lip curls.

“You’re no Arryn,” he says. “You’re a Stark. Or a Lannister, a Bolton, a Stone, I don’t care. You’ve got no rights to the Eyrie, nor any to the Vale.” 

“As I recall, the Lord’s family inherits his castle and territory when he dies. Not a cousin thrice removed.” Harding’s men begin to look uncomfortable. They did not expect resistance when they came for the crown. She wonders how many will go when she orders them to, how many will recognize her numbers and her power. She expects most. She prepares for none.

“The Lord’s blood family,” Harding corrects her. “You’ve got no son, no heir. No claim.”

She presses a hand over her empty womb, leans forward, and says, “It remains to be seen.” 

The hall is engulfed in murmurs. Satisfied, she reclines, and watches Harding struggle for words.

“Lord Protector, then,” he says, at last. “Until the babe is born.” 

“The Lady Regent rules in her husband’s stead, until her son can be expected to rule,” Sansa says. “Or did you also demand the throne of Lady Lysa, when Lord Jon died?”

“Lady Lysa had a son.” 

“As I might. And in that event, his opinion of you will not be softened by your attempts to deny him a birthright.” She watches Harding’s fist flex around the pommel of his sword. “At any rate, in nine months, we will know. I, for one, would wait.”

Harding makes a few more halfhearted arguments, but he has already lost. He knows it. He retreats, with all his gleaming knights behind him, swords clean, backs cold, and bellies empty. The whole realm knows of Lady Sansa’s supposed pregnancy by nightfall. It is said that in the week after her announcement to Harrold Harding, the Eyrie was trafficked by so many ravens it appeared more roost than castle. 

***

She buys herself nine moon cycles. Nine moons until Harrold Hardyng comes back, sword drawn, expecting to hear of her babe’s sex. Of course, this is only true in the strictest sense; realistically, she has one moon, maybe two, before the court begins to suspect her flat belly, and she will either have to stuff her dresses or find some way to explain her lack of child. 

Littlefinger comes to her more often. He offers suggestions, usually bloody, as to the problem of Harding’s claim, and each she rejects with equal vehemence. She will not destroy a house to secure her own claim.

_It would be easy,_ Littlefinger pleads. _A word here, a pocket of coin there. Harding is not popular everywhere, nowhere as much as you. The man who threatened Bran was bought with ten gold dragons._

“Ten dragons to start a war that killed thousands,” she says acidly. “You always did find ways to make gold stretch.”

The phantom Littlefinger would smile and spread his hands. Then he would vanish, as he always did, once he had made his suggestions. He had little to say otherwise. This was how she knew him to be a figment of her own imagination, and not an earnest specter — the real Petyr was always speaking, always wheedling her this way or that, or dropping suggestive remarks about her hair, her eyes, her body. He would never be quiet of his own accord. 

“No killing,” she says aloud. “They would all suspect me anyway. No matter whose dagger I used.”

The guard at her door pokes his head in, puzzled. “Milady?”

She waves him off. “Talking to myself, Meagor,” she says airily. “Pay no attention.” 

Eventually, in the second week following Robin’s death, Littlefinger gives and provides her with a bloodless idea. 

_You know how to forge his signature. Perhaps, in his final moments, the Lord Paramount spared a thought for his then-childless wife._

“You’re getting slow,” she says, picking up her quill, and she’s talking to herself as much as she’s talking to him. “Before, you would’ve thought of that in minutes.” 

_If it was like before, I would have already had it forged for you. I would have killed the boy myself._

“Go away,” she says, carving out the first letters in Robin’s clumsy, childish hand. “You would have killed us both before you let me have any power over you.” 

Littlefinger stays away for a long time, after that. She welcomes the silence. 

***

The lords of the Vale — most of them, anyway — are happy to accept Lord Robin’s hastily written last will and testament, even given its unorthodox content. There are those unwilling to see a woman sit the throne, and those she plies with gold; others still resent having wasted time flattering Harding in the hopes of a chance on his council, and those she awards generous gifts in return for loyalty. Harding, of course, challenges the will’s legitimacy, but the signature is undeniable, down to the splatter of ink where Robin could not keep the quill even, and the fragrant perfume of his medicines.

Harrold Hardying raises one hell of a stir, until she sends fifty Knights of the Vale down to his house seat to explain to him the meaning of  _Lady Paramount._ Although she would never leave herself alone in a room with him, she trusts him not to cause trouble for his liege, so long as she lets him keep is familial lands and titles. 

Sansa Arryn is named Lady Paramount of the Vale one month after her husband’s death, and she takes the throne to a raucously cheering crowd. Harrold Harding could never compete; she spent two years trapped within the Eyrie’s walls, coaxing it into her palm. She whispered and worked and worried her fingers away to the bone making the people of the Vale love her, and then, in the span of one evening, took it without cutting a single throat. 

(Sansa Stark is one of two women alive to rule a whole kingdom without a husband or a son. When she takes the seat, it is not the living Queen she thinks of, but a woman long dead, who for all her faults understood that power is not magic or fire or blood.) 

(Power is power.)

(On the day of Sansa Stark’s coronation, she wears her hair like Cersei Lannister.)

***

The Dragon Queen summons Sansa to King’s Landing after half a year of unchallenged rule. She writes to Jon in a flurry of hasty script, terrified that this means the woman seeks to kill her, or burn her, or take from her what she fought for. Something in her belly curls and balks at the idea of returning to the cage. Once, she had sworn to burn the whole city to the ground, if she could. Once, she had promised to fling herselffrom her window before riding South.

Jon’s reply consists of five words, also hastily scrawled, which do a little shy of nothing to comfort her worries. 

_She only wants to talk._

But one does not decline an audience with the Dragon Queen.

And so Sansa rides South. 

***

She takes with her a troop of the most well-trained ladies in her employ, and hires four more. She brings forty Knights of the Vale, a hundred courtiers, and twenty sellswords. (She does not trust honest men to protect her in King’s Landing.) She has new dresses made, in the colors of every house the queen might favor that Sansa can claim her own: Stark greys, Tully blues, Arryn blacks. She commissions the queen a gift — a statue made of dragonglass, carved by the finest artists the Vale has — to be presented on the eve before their audience. 

Sansa arrives in King’s Landing on the same night as a snowstorm, and in the whirling currents of ice and frost, she slips into the Red Keep without so much as an announcement. She is housed in the West Tower, where guests go, and where, as Sansa Stark, she never had reason to look. As a result, the rooms she inhabits now are foreign to her — the Targaryen queen has torn down the tapestries of Robert’s Rebellion, all the pictures of famous Baratheons and Lannisters, and replaced them with silver-haired, violet-eyed strangers. There’s not a room in the place that’s not styled in black or red. Dragons are carved into any piece of furniture that’ll hold one’s likeness. The Traitor’s Walk is now decorated with statues of lions and stags, in what must be the most unsubtle piece of symbolism that Sansa’s ever seen. 

Sansa finds it excessive, but she understands it. After twenty years away, the queen wants to remind the court who sits on the throne, and it’s hard to forget if their bed wears her colors.

The first time she sees a Dothrak strolling around in the gardens, her heart almost turns still in her chest. Clutching her handmaid’s arm, she retreats behind a hedge until he leaves. 

“They’re common, here,” her handmaid murmurs. “They were the Queen’s servants before any Westerosi pledged his banners.” 

“I know,” Sansa says. “An unexpected sight. Nothing more.” 

She does not think of how easy it would be for any of the Dothraki to put two fingers around her neck and pinch, or to draw their curved blades and open an artery, or for them to bounce her head against the nearest hard surface —

It has been too long since she was surrounded by men not sworn to her. It has made her skittish, and set her off her guard.

On the third day of her stay, she finds Jon. 

Apparently, he missed the news of her arrival — he comes pounding up the stairs of her quarters with the grace of a stampeding bull, and she knows it’s him. Nobody else has had the nerve to approach her like that since she was Sansa Stark.

When he bursts into her chambers, she doesn’t bother with a reprimand, although it would probably be advisable. Encouraging laissez-faire treatment of her space does not befit a Lady Paramount. Nor should His Grace, Aegon of Houses Targaryen and Stark, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm, engage in unruly behavior with a woman far beneath his station, regardless of familial relation. Nevertheless, she flings her arms around his neck and presses her face into his shoulder and lets him hold her, breathing in the scent of his leather and the odd scent that Northern men carry, something even years of Southern soaps and wines can’t wash out. He hugs her and spins her around, just like he’d do to Arya as a boy, and when she pulls back to look at him, _really_ look at him, for the first time in two years, he looks so much like Father that a knot rises in her throat and she has to stare at her toes to keep her eyes dry. 

“You grew a beard,” she says.

“You took over a kingdom,” he says, and she laughs so hard that she cries, and then she cries so hard that he hugs her again, and they stay like that, for a while — an Arryn and a Targaryen, or a Bolton and a Snow, or — as Sansa decides — two Starks, reunited so very far from home. 

***

“She’s not so bad,” he says, “the Queen.” 

They’re strolling atop the Maidenvault, which the Queen has turned into a nest for her dragon. From inside, Sansa can see Rhaegal curled up, asleep, nostrils trailing smoke. If anything, he has grown since she saw him last. 

“No?”

“No. She’s not her father. Nor her brother — either of them.” 

“That’s good to hear,” Sansa says. 

Jon gives her an exasperated look from the corner of his eye. “I’m telling the truth,” he says.

She’s forgotten what it’s like to have someone tell she’s lying. It catches her off-guard, but pleasantly so. Remembering what it is to trust someone is a slow, unsettling process, like flexing a muscle and feeling it ache from disuse. 

“I’m sure you think you are,” she says, one of those meaningless barbs that the Lannisters were so fond of. It occurs to her that the last time she set foot in King’s Landing, she was a Lannister, too. 

“Sansa.” Jon’s disappointment stings. She pats his arm and turns her head away so she doesn’t have to look at it. A lie flies to the tip of her tongue — she’s sure if she tried, she could fool him — but she swallows it.

“I mean no insult,” she says. That’s true. “I do believe you think her a good queen. And I trust your judgement, Jon. I trust you on matters regarding your kingdom, your castle, your knights.”

“But.” 

“But your flaw,” she says gently, “is that — through no fault of your own — you are very much in love with your wife.”

He blinks. “And that’s a problem,” he says.

“I never trust people on the subjects of the people they’re in love with,” she tells him. “They’re a dangerous, unpredictable sort of person — people in love.” 

He laughs, and she does, too. Lets him think it’s a joke. 

“A fair point,” he says, in a way that makes it obvious he thinks it isn’t. “But even if I weren’t her husband, I’d support Daenerys. She’s good to her people. And she won’t harm you.” He turns and stares into her eyes. “I won’t let her harm you, Sansa.” 

Sansa glances to her left and sees Cersei Lannister leaning on the bannister, gazing off into the distance and sipping a glass of wine. 

“I know she won’t,” she says, and Jon pats her hand warmly, thinking he has convinced her. She lets him believe it. But the reason that Daenerys won’t harm her is not because Jon, or any other man in the Seven Kingdoms, will protect Sansa from her. 

(Daenerys will not harm Sansa Stark because Sansa Stark will protect herself.)

***

_You should ask about the line of succession,_ says Cersei, lounging across Sansa’s chaise. _The dragon whore is barren. Unless the bastard outlives her and takes a second wife, the Targaryens will end with the pair of them._ She sighs. _It was moronic of them to wed. If she’d found him a good fruitful girl, he could’ve had three or four little heirs and spares running around by now._

“They married so the kingdoms wouldn’t go to war over the line of succession,” Sansa says flatly, and signs a letter to her Lord Regent with a flourish. “And so she wouldn’t have to kill the only other trueborn Targaryen alive.”

_He wouldn’t have fought her for it. Jon Snow would’ve been happy to settle down in a keep the size of your bathhouse and do nothing but shoot babies into some pretty thing for the rest of his life._

“And she would have lost the support that came from being rightful heir.”

_Do you think many lords would care about whose cunt Jon Snow came out of with an army of Dothraki at their gates and a dragon breathing down their neck?_

Sansa’s lips twitch. “She can’t threaten _everybody_ into submission.” 

_You care too much about the people’s love. What good did the people’s love do anybody, when I sat the Iron Throne? Did they run from their houses to unseat me? Did they take up swords for Daenerys’ foreign army just because I didn’t kiss their arses?_

“My memory of you is remarkably foulmouthed,” says Sansa, “for someone who swore infrequently in life.” 

_Lords don’t like to hear their ladies behaving the same way they do. I don’t have to mind my mouth around a Northern traitor._

“True enough,” Sansa concedes, and banishes Cersei. She is not so bereft of company that she needs the ghosts of King’s Landing lurking around her bedchambers while trying to work. 

***

A week after she arrives in King’s Landing, the Queen summons her for an audience.

Sansa dresses in a high-collared gown, only a shade lighter than black. A grey chain winds across her chest, like the fastening of armor, and another hangs around the wrist of her gloves. King’s Landing is warmer than the Eyrie, even in the depths of winter, but she nevertheless wears heeled boots and the heavy underskirts that broaden her silhouette. Every thread of hair is pulled up into a tight braid circling her head, with diamonds set into the crevasses, mimicking the metalwork of a crown; jewelry is otherwise forgone. No paint touches her face.

Her reflection is austere, and beautiful, although the latter she cares little for. She looks, for once, like the woman she is, and there is something tranquil about the rare harmony. No fluttering silks, no ungainly ruffs, nothing to suggest or to welcome amorous thoughts. Sansa does not dress to be desired, not anymore.

When she walks into the Great Hall, she waits for the steward to recite her titles before bowing. She takes pleasure in every hard-won word.

“Introducing Sansa, of House Arryn,” he says, “Lady of the Eyrie, Lady Paramount of the Vale and the Mountain, and Wardeness of the East.”

She dips a curtsey suited to a Dornish dancer. Her nose almost touches the floor before she rises.

The woman at the Queen’s side straightens and speaks. “You stand in the presence of Her Grace, Daenerys of House Targaryen,” she says, “Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Protector of the Realm, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Mother of Dragons, the Unburnt, and the Breaker of Chains.” 

Sansa should have guessed that Daenerys wouldn’t concede her titles when she married Jon. All the same, she conceals her surprise.

In the corner, Cersei rolls her eyes and knocks back a particularly large gulp of wine.

“Your Grace,” Sansa says, by way of greetings. Standing aside the throne, Jon shifts uncomfortably, glancing at his wife. Sansa has no doubt that the seating arrangement caused something of a stir among their advisors.

Daenerys Targaryen finally takes her eyes off the steward and settles them on Sansa. 

“Sansa Stark,” she says. 

The name has not been said aloud in years. It rings in Sansa’s ears like a Northern song.

“Yes?”

“Not Arryn,” Daenerys clarifies. Her voice is clear and smooth, but it curls some Westerosi words with a foreigner’s lilt. A reminder that the Queen did not grow up within her homeland’s borders, that her childhood belongs to a distant country, not her own.

“My name, by law, is Sansa Arryn, Your Grace.” 

“You have no child by Robin Arryn,” says the Queen. “Not after two years of marriage.”

The time in which she could have lied about a pregnancy is long passed; she had faked a miscarriage to the people of the Eyrie weeks ago, and with Robin’s false testament still preserved in the library, there was no strategic value to remaining ‘with child.’ 

“No, Your Grace,” she allows.

“Nor with Ramsay Bolton, after — to my understanding — repeated consummation.”

_Rape,_ Cersei sneers. _Do you think she knows the word, in Westerosi?_  

“No, Your Grace,” Sansa repeats. 

“Nor with Tyrion Lannister,” says Daenerys, and the man himself shifts uncomfortably. He stands at her other flank, the Hand’s pin glittering on his chest, and Sansa does not look at the man once called her husband. He, too, grew a beard. It ages him considerably.

She wishes to talk to Tyrion, explain to him all that has happened. She wants to thank him for the kindness he showed her, and to tell him that for all his family did to her, she is grateful he is alive.

“No, Your Grace.”

“Would you contend that all three were impotent?” 

“That would seem somewhat far-fetched, Your Grace,” Sansa says. She understands where the Queen is leading her, although she does not know why. Daenerys, expression inscrutable, nods.

“And you have never mothered a child.” 

“No.” Hastily, Sansa adds, “Your Grace.” 

Her recalcitrance brings a flicker of irritation to Daenerys’ face. “Can you explain it?”

Sansa’s mind races.

Cersei sighs. 

_She wants to know if you’ve mothered a claimant._ _You’ve married into half the houses in Westeros, one of them’s got to have a Targaryen ancestor._

“My first marriage was put aside, Your Grace,” Sansa says. “It was unconsummated. The second was against my will, to a man whose house is gone, and lands are now under rule of my brother, Brandon Stark.” She wets her lips. “Robin Arryn was impotent, my liege. But he named me heir to the Eyrie, and the Vale, before his death. Regardless of my name, my titles are my own.” 

“Are they.” Daenerys breaks eye contact, and her gaze skirts around the room. There are no dragon skulls — the ones that hung here before Robert’s Rebellion were all thrown into the sea, and the Queen’s dragons, when they died, left no skulls to hang — but there are statues, affixed to the marble pillars, expressions snarling and fearsome. 

Out of the blue, the Queen says, “You don’t speak like a Northerner, Sansa Stark.” 

(Sansa Stark naturally speaks with a Northern burr, words low in her throat and gruff on her tongue, and her voice stands out amongst the lyrical choir of King’s Landing like a dog among thrushes. Once, long ago, she learned how to sing like a Southern bird, how to clip her consonants and elongate her vowels, how to bury her birthplace under layers of alien vocabulary and foreign sounds, and it is this voice that people in the Vale responded to; this voice that diplomats and foreign envoys would smile to hear, a sign that the North taught their birds how to sing properly.)

(With her next words to the Dragon Queen, Sansa Stark sounds every inch as Northern as her father, words rolling off her tongue in thick, icy syllables. It is rough and inelegant and Jon Snow, standing at the Queen’s side, looks proud.) 

“With all due respect, Your Grace,” she says, “I don’t believe you would know how a Northerner speaks.” 

The Queen lifts an eyebrow, and then a smile tugs at the corner of her painted lips.

“Perhaps,” she says, and then beckons. “Come closer.” 

Sansa does. Looking at Jon would make her seem anxious, so instead she looks at Tyrion, whom she is satisfied to find healthy and well-groomed. He nods to her impassively, and she returns the gesture. They two are the oldest friends here, the ones who know this castle the best. The only two to survive the lion’s nest, in the end.

She stops at the foot of the stairs. The angle requires her to look almost straight up, baring her face for inspection, which doubtlessly pleases Daenerys. The Queen inspects her, stiff-backed, fingers drumming on the steel arms of her throne.

“What do you want, Sansa Stark?”

The question seems to alarm Jon. He glances at his wife uncertainly.

It does not alarm Sansa. It’s a rare relief to have the question asked outright. 

“Freedom,” she says simply. “Peace. As much power as it takes to get them. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more?” Daenerys narrows her eyes. “Your father sought to kill mine. He, too, spoke of freedom and peace.”

“Your father wanted to burn Westeros to ash, Your Grace. He was justified in seeking power to avoid its abuse.”

“You are defending a traitor and an usurper.”

“I am defending my father’s honor, Your Grace, and explaining why our situations are not alike.” Sansa takes a step toward the throne, and two of the Kingsguard touch their swords. Two of her own knights, flanking her, touch theirs. “Eddard Stark was your brother by law,” she adds. “That he killed a tyrant does not make him less your family.” 

“Do you claim to be my family, Lady Stark?”

Sansa gestures to Jon. “By marriage,” she says. “Twice.” 

Cersei’s eyebrow quirks.  _This isn’t your best. Grow a spine and make her an offer. You’re the only working womb they’ve got. Use that._

She ignores Cersei. Daenerys remains silent, so Sansa takes her cue to speak. 

“I don’t want your throne,” she offers. “I don’t want anything to do with this city, really. I want to live and die in the North, preferably at Winterfell, but in the Eyrie, failing that.” She folds her hands. “I want to reunite with my brother, Bran, and my sister, Arya, and any other living relatives I’ve got left, and I want to die of old age.” She lifts her chin. “From the bottom of my heart, my queen, I wish you the crown, and everything that comes with it.” 

Tyrion is the only one who sees this for what it is. His face darkens, and he swallows, but doesn’t say anything; his eyes drop to the floor.

“Fine,” says Daenerys. “Believe it or not, I didn’t call you here to threaten you.”

“In my experience, Your Grace, rulers rarely call formal audiences to do anything but.”

Daenerys blinks, and Sansa fervently regrets it.

Cersei snorts a laugh. 

Then the Queen turns to her hand and says, “She’s got your tongue. Unbelievable.” 

“I’m sure Lady Sansa doesn’t deserve that kind of insult,” Tyrion says, with a characteristic airiness that denies the seriousness of the situation.

“It’s not an insult, it’s a fact. Or do all Northerners show their respect by contradicting their lieges?”

“In honesty, Your Grace,” Jon says, fighting a smile, “they generally do.” 

The atmosphere in the hall lightens, like the ice snapping on a frozen lake, and Sansa allows herself to breathe again. Daenerys is smiling, earnestly smiling, at her husband’s remark, and it brings a warmth into her eyes that Sansa never would have imagined on a Targaryen’s face.

“Well, then,” says Daenerys. “I shall take Lady Sansa’s conduct as a sign of her utmost respect.

“Regarding you, specifically,” she continues, turning back to Sansa. “I called you here to offer you a position.”

Sansa stiffens. Ideas of distant southern keeps and famished lands, or coveted seats on the Small Council, flash before her mind’s eye. Each of them is more unappealing than the last.

“King Aegon informs me that you served as a competent Lady of Winterfell, during your tenure there,” says Daenerys. “And Brandon Stark cannot have children.”

“You mean to give me my brother’s lands?”

Daenerys’ silence answers her.

“No,” Sansa says. “I — I thank you for your kindness, Your Grace, and your infinite generosity, but I — those lands are Brandon Stark’s, and will be until his death, whereupon they will pass to my sister, Arya —”

“Who has vanished into the depths of Essos, if you hadn’t noticed,” Daenerys says dryly. “And Brandon will never father sons. The North needs a line of succession, and we are running out of Starks.”

Sansa hesitates.

“He would be hailed as Warden of the North,” she stipulates. “I would only — maintain it.”

“Of course.” Daenerys waves her hand dismissively. “We’ll sort out titles after, who’s Lord and Lady of what and where. But you will be restored as heiress to Winterfell, and sent to live there, until such a time as a male heir to the Stark line emerges.”

The promise echoes that of Petyr Baelish, back when she was just fleeing the city for the first time: _Winterfell will be yours._

And she’s never stopped wanting Winterfell, not really. Not since she was thirteen years old and sitting in a tower in the Red Keep, aching for home.

Cersei sets down her wine and looks her in the eye. _Don’t be stupid,_ she snarls. _They don’t want you for your managerial talents. They want you because you can give them children. Nice loyal Stark babes, with black hair and blue eyes and a nice fat head to put a crown on. One of Lyanna’s side. Aegon over there makes the Stark family heir presumptive to the throne, and they want a babe born this century to sit it._

Sansa squares her jaw.

Littlefinger appears, then, too, leaning on the wall beside her, face every bit as young as the first time she saw it. This is a different Littlefinger than she would talk to in the Eyrie, this one dressed in summer clothes, with more black in his hair, and fewer rings on his fingers.

_One more time,_ he says. _One more time. One more Lord, one more Lord’s son, and one more night, what difference is it? What’s one more?_

She thinks of Winterfell, of its graceful, slanting roofs, of the way that the first snows settle gentle on its head. She thinks of Bran, spending all his days out in the Weirwood, while she runs the castle by raven from the Eyrie. She wonders if he is watching her now, through his magic all-seeing eyes. She wonders what he would tell her to say.

(She doesn’t care, really.)

Sansa Stark squares her shoulders, gathers her wits, and tells Queen Daenerys Targaryen _no_. 

***

“You,” Tyrion complains, striding into her sitting room, “are exceptionally stupid.” 

She does not look up from her book. “I’ve been told,” she says evenly. “Rarely have those who say so outlived me.” 

“You’re still alive. No one’s outlived you yet.” Tyrion pours himself some wine from the pitcher on her table and sits down across from her. “Don’t try and be clever,” he adds, “it doesn’t suit you.” 

“That sounded like an insult.”

“It wasn’t.” Tyrion drinks. “You know, most people — when offered a title and sizable portion of land by the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and Mother of Dragons — would say _yes.”_

“Most people are not Hand to the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms and Mother of Dragons, and to that effect, most people would not understand the reasons one might have for turning her down.” She closes her book. “Nor are you most people.” 

“No. Neither of us are most people. I do wish you’d have done what most people would have, though, in that one, _isolated_ instance.” 

She shrugs. “I suppose it wouldn’t make sense. Jon doesn’t understand it, either. I expect he’s cross with me.” She sets the book aside. “He probably thought I would solve all of their problems.” 

“It makes sense,” Tyrion says. “I don’t agree with you, but it makes sense.” 

“Does it?” She watches him carefully. She is suspicious of any man who claims to understand her, nowadays, even men like Tyrion Lannister. “Then explain it,” she says, and watches him.

He sets down his glass. “You don’t want to marry,” he says.

She nods.

“Reasonable. You’ve done it thrice. I imagine one would get tired of all the hubbub, at this point.” He leans forward and murmurs, “I was sent to tell you that Daenerys doesn’t really care if your children are legitimate. She can make them Starks, as long as they’re yours.” 

“The Queen’s generosity is unparalleled.”

“She _is_ being generous.” 

“She’s looking for an heir,” Sansa says, pushing back her chair and standing up. “She married the only member of her family capable of producing one, and now she’s asking to use me. All in exchange for giving back what originally belonged to me.” 

“The North is Bran’s.”

“Of course it is. And I gave it to him, willingly so. But it’s no great generosity to take Winterfell from one Stark and give it to another.” She walks to the window and stares out upon King’s Landing, its squirming, crowded streets. “Why can’t Jon give her a bastard, anyway? He’s a real Targaryen.”

“King Aegon,” Tyrion says, with an exaggerated deference that suggests he’s had several infuriating conversations with the man in question, “refuses to impugn the honor of his queen by breaking his vows to her, and has refused, with special insistence, to father any bastards.” 

“So it’s all right for him to decline, but he’s willing to use me for the same purpose?”

“I don’t believe he knew the Queen’s plan before you came,” Tyrion assures her, his tone pacificatory. “Nor do I believe he would have consented to it, had he known.” 

“But he supports it now?”

“He cannot dispute Daenerys’ judgement in front of their court. He could say nothing to suggest a rift between them, especially given the nature of their arrangement, even for your benefit, or else they’d start a war. Metaphorically speaking.” Tyrion swirls his glass. “Have you not even considered —”

“ _Considered_ ,” Sansa chokes. “I’ve done it. Three times.” 

He obviously regrets his choice of words, but does not interrupt her to correct himself.

“I have served as a broodmare, as a token, as a bridge between families. I’ve furthered wars, I’ve prevented wars, I’ve fought in wars. I have been — I have had _unspeakable_ things done to me and to those that I love, and I have done unspeakable things to others. I have killed, and married, and lied, and the one thing that I have not done is bear a child. I have mothered no bastards nor trueborns, and I have not once shared the bed of a man who loved me.” Sansa clings to the back of her chair for strength, and says: “I will not do it. I will not do it again.” 

Tyrion watches her with eyes older and sadder than a man his age has any right to be.

“You’ll lose Winterfell,” he says.

She draws herself up.

“Then I lose Winterfell,” she says. “I have done all that I can to ensure its safety, and that it is held in the hands of someone named Stark. Everything I have ever done has been in pursuit of that singular goal.” She takes a deep breath of the salty-sweet perfumed air of King’s Landing. “I am Lady of the Eyrie and of the Vale, and Wardeness of the East. My brother is capable. I want no more.”

Tyrion’s smile is bittersweet.

“Ned Stark’s daughter,” he says. “There you are.” 

***

When she returns to the Eyrie, the people celebrate for a day and a night. They celebrate the return of their lady, and of their lady’s coronation, and perhaps a little bit just for the sake of it, for the glory of having something to celebrate after so many years of war and upheaval and uncertainty. They celebrate having a ruler who is neither decrepit nor adolescent nor cruel.

On her nameday that year, they celebrate her directly, in a way that bewilders her. They sing Northern songs and buy gallons of bitter Northern ale and make direwolf kites, to fly alongside their regular hawks and falcons. And though they butcher the lyrics of her Northern ballads, and she has always preferred Southern sweet wine, when she looks out the window and sees a direwolf kite drifting by her bedroom, she decides she loves these strange, funny people of the Vale. 

(Lord Grafton suggests a celebratory tourney, and she shocks the whole room with the vehemence of her refusal.) 

(For the rest of her life, Sansa Stark never holds a tourney for her nameday. For what it’s worth, neither do Queen Daenerys or King Aegon.)

She is surprised by the quiet of life. She became an adult during a war, and was built for one, so in peacetime, she is shocked by the ease of ruling. It helps that the people of the Vale are not a very difficult people to manage — after all, an ancient old man managed it, as did a seven-year-old, for a time. Sansa at first suspects she’s missing something, like a covert rebellion or conspiracy among lords, but gradually comes to realize that nobody north of Riverrun has the cunning or the initiative for a rebellion, and she comes to trust the lords she feeds at her table.

(And if she does not trust them, well — Petyr Baelish did wonderful things for the Eyrie’s coffers, while he was alive.)

Every year, she makes a pilgrimage to Winterfell, where she stays for a few weeks before returning. She speaks to Bran as often as she can, during these visits, and he serves as an envoy for all the other trips she cannot afford to make; he speaks to her of Jon, in King’s Landing, and tells her what Jon will not in his letters. The Targaryens are happy together, if not always with each other’s leadership policies, and Daenerys has not the patience for plotters in her court; the dragons feast on traitors each year, and each year in decreasing numbers. 

He speaks of Brienne, at the Wall, who has been learning, albeit slowly, how to navigate the world of relations between the Westerosi and the Free Folk; as a member of the few who fought personally beside the Free Folk in the War for the Dawn, she is among the few that the Folk trust to speak with among Westerosi councils. There has been nothing to really fight at the Wall for a long time.

He speaks of Lyanna Mormont, growing taller but no less stubborn, and the flourishing country of Bear Island. The girl has been sent eighteen marriage offers within the past five years and turned down every one of them.

“Good,” Sansa says, with a ferocity that surprises even herself. Bran lifts his eyebrows, but does not comment upon it. 

On an unrelated note, he says, Bear Island finds itself with a high population of skilled female swordfighters, and a very low population of anybody who knows how to cook worth a damn. They have begun hosting spear-fighting tourneys. The knights who come to Bear Island to participate in them are invariably beaten. 

“They’ll be like Wildlings before the year’s out,” Sansa always jokes, and Bran always shrugs, as if to say, _that wouldn’t be so bad._ And she agrees with him, after a while. 

Then, usually on the second or third day of her visit, she says: “Tell me about Arya.” 

And he tells her: this year, Arya is in Braavos, revisiting some old friends whose names Bran, for whatever reason, cannot seem to give. This year, Arya is in Dorne, scurrying around and killing for money. This year, Arya is in Tyrosh, posing as a rich lord for reasons Bran cannot offer. This year, she’s in the Bay of Dragons, scraping the remains of the slave trade out of the regions Daenerys could not reach.

This year, Arya is in Riverrun, taking a boat up the Blue Fork of the Trident with a man called —

“ _Riverrun?”_ Sansa cries, standing. “Riverrun — she’s in Westeros!”

“Yes,” Bran says, and then notices the look in her eyes. “Sansa,” he says, pained. “Sansa, you can’t —”

“If we ride south tomorrow,” she says excitedly, “and send a raven to Tytos Blackwood, we can house there on our way to the Blue Fork —” 

“Sansa,” he insists.

She quiets, and stares at him.

“She doesn’t want to see us,” he says. “She’ll make her own way north, when the time comes.”

“When the time comes,” she says. “And when will it come?”

“Soon,” he says, and his face settles into the disinterested slate that characterized him, during those first few moons after his return from beyond the Wall.

(They have been making progress, she thinks, in chipping away at the rock-hull that has surrounded her brother’s personality. Or perhaps the Three-Eyed Raven has merely learned how to pretend to be Brandon Stark. Either way, it is in these moments — of tension, of discord, of strife — that he relapses, and sneaks away behind the armor of his mystic powers to avoid confronting his own issues.)

Sansa swallows her anger dutifully, like a lady, and before she can say anything cruel to her brother, she removes herself from his company. 

***

Sansa Arryn rules the Vale for one year, two years, five years.

—It had never occurred to her, when she was young, how fast things change hands: lords age and lords die, lords are born and a breath later they’re married off, lords have heirs and lords go off to feud over tiny scraps of land and they die, and make children into lords all over again. She wants to scream at them, sometimes: _You don’t know what a war is; you’re all babes playing at battle, squabbling over square miles and grain fields and mills; I fought for_ kingdoms, _for life itself._

Five years, ten years, fifteen years. 

—Her thirty-second name day is heralded by a procession: Queen Daenerys is performing a tour of her territory, court in tow, and the Eyrie sees a dragon land on its balcony for the first time in centuries. 

—She welcomes Jon with a kiss to the cheek, and his wife with a kiss to the hand, and they trade pleasant words, and neither of them brings up the offer the Queen once made, or the answer the Lady Paramount gave her. The folds around Daenerys’ eyes have deepened considerably. Her hair was always white, but it has lost some of its luster, and her skin has begun to wilt over her bones. She is still beautiful, but it is a different kind of beauty than that of youth — nothing that will stun hundreds, or compel men to madness for a chance at her favor. Jon still looks at her like she hung the moon, of course, but he is one of a declining number.

—A man named Jorah Mormont, whom Sansa distantly remembers from the Great War, trails in the Queen’s wake. He stares at the Queen with such longing that Sansa wonders why Jon doesn’t challenge him to a duel then and there, but then she remembers that Jon is an idiot. It’s just as well. There would be no point in killing him; Mormont must be approaching sixty, and does not seem wont to try and steal the Queen from the King. And from the tired drag in his step, it has been a long time since he stood a chance of managing it.

—Arya is creeping further north, with an agonizing slowness. Sansa tells Jon this, and he beams with an earnest innocence that knocks her breathless. That anyone could retain that innocence, after living so long in King’s Landing —

—King’s Landing is not as it once was, he tells her. Dany makes it different.

—King’s Landing will always be what it once was, she tells him, so long as there is a King. But she hugs him anyway. 

Fifteen years, seventeen years, twenty years.

A raven comes from Winterfell on her thirty-seventh nameday.

_Come as quickly as you can,_ Bran writes, his hand elegant but rushed. The second line reads simply: _Arya._

Sansa discards all but five of her guard in order to travel with maximum haste. It is said, later, that the Lady of the Eyrie rode to Winterfell in a time shorter than it took most men to sail from King’s Landing to Dragonstone. These are exaggerations, but when Sansa Stark leaps from her exhausted, sweat-stained horse and pounds on the gates of Winterfell, demanding to be let in, even Bran is surprised to see her there so early.

Arya is not tall, and she is still thin, made slender by a lack of any steady source of meals and a profession requiring near-constant exercise. Her hair has grown long, and she ties it back in a braid; her cheekbones are emphasized by the hollows under them, and her eyes dart around the room, unable to settle, always watching for hidden swords and sleights-of-hand. Her clothes smell of strange spices, and she carries with her still that horrible trunk of faces, but all the grotesque oddities in the world could not bar Sansa Stark from flinging herself at her sister. 

They embrace for a long time. Arya says, by and by, with an accent that is not Northern: “I remember you being shorter.” 

“I remember you being taller,” Sansa retorts, sounding, to her own embarrassment, a bit choked. “How’d you manage to get even smaller since I saw you last?”

“I can still kill you,” Arya threatens, and that ekes a laugh out of both of them. The lives they have lived gave them both dark senses of humor.

Then Sansa notices a muscled giant of a man standing, surly, in the corner, and she pulls back.

His eyes are Baratheon blue.

“Sansa,” Arya says, pulling back. Her cheeks are red. “This is Gendry Baratheon.” 

Sansa pales. “No,” she says. “No — you —”

“I don’t want the throne,” Gendry says quickly. “I don’t want anything to do with Daenerys Targaryen, never. I’d be just as happy for you to call me Waters, milady, and actually rather obliged if you did.”

“One of Robert’s bastards,” Sansa realizes. “Of extraordinary longevity.”

“Yes.” Arya is still fidgeting, which means that isn’t even the biggest news; Sansa steels herself for whatever they’re actually nervous about. 

“We’ve stayed out of Westeros,” Gendry hedges. “Figured that if I didn’t make a problem, the Queen wouldn’t go looking for one.”

“A good idea,” Sansa agrees, and waits.

“Ah,” Arya says, and flushes darker. “I — we came back, you see, for a reason.”

“I assumed,” Sansa says calmly. “Would you care to tell me what it is?”

Arya and Gendry share a glance. Arya, with great trepidation, places a hand over her stomach. 

***

No one knows what was said to Lady Sansa, that day in the Lord’s Chambers at Winterfell. All that is known is that whatever Lady Sansa did thereafter sent Gendry Waters, son of King Robert Baratheon and former soldier in the War for the Dawn, sprinting from the room like a dog with its tail on fire. 

***

Arya is pregnant.

Sansa tries out these words on her tongue. She makes multiple attempts to get through them. So far, she has been unsuccessful, but she is determined to manage it before the babe comes, and so she perseveres.

Bran responds with a patently fake smile. “Oh, my,” he says. “Congratulations.” 

Arya winces, and he frowns. “I thought that was good,” he says, and turns to Sansa. “I did try.”

“A bit flat, dear,” Sansa says, and pats his hand. “Try for a bit of warmth, next time.”

“There won’t _be_ a next time,” he says petulantly. “You know how I know that? The same way I knew Arya was pregnant in the first place. Not because she told me. It’s not a _surprise.”_

“Hush!” Sansa swats him. “We’ve talked about telling people what will happen to them, Bran.” 

“Why? She’s glad of it,” he says, disgruntled, gesturing to Arya.

Arya is, indeed, glad of it. “Gods be good,” she mutters, “no more surprises.” 

“A surprise,” Bran deadpans. “Arya, at a certain point, probability dictates —”

“ _Brandon Stark!”_

Arya howls with laughter. “You sound just like Mother,” she gasps, and Sansa heats, but she cannot help but feel something pleased uncurl in her belly, something old and childish, but satisfying, all the same. 

***

Sansa stays at Winterfell for the duration of her sister’s pregnancy. She watches Arya’s belly swell with a feeling not akin to jealousy, exactly, but a naïve curiosity. She knows that in another life, a life similar to this one, even, her womb had borne the same trials, had given forth the same fruit, and from time to time she wonders what it would be like to live there. When she tells Arya of this feeling, Arya’s response is a terribly characteristic: “I’ll tell you how it feels to live there,” she says fiercely, “it feels like shit.” 

“Arya!”

“Like you haven’t heard worse,” Arya says, and waves it off.

“You’ll have to stop swearing when the babe comes,” Sansa tells her, and this, too, Arya waves off.

“They’ll learn early,” she says, and Sansa swears to steal the babe herself, if need be, to protect its virginal ears.

“It’s ironic,” she remarks. “You were always the one who swore off husbands and castles and children, and now — well, you’re the only one of us who’ll ever have any.” 

“Are you sorry?”

“What do you mean?”

Arya fiddles with her hands. “Are you sorry it’s mine,” she says. “Instead of yours, or Robb’s, or Bran’s. That it won’t be a true Stark.” 

Sansa reaches over and closes her hand around her sister’s, stilling the woman’s fiddling. “It will be a Stark,” she says, quietly, and with a finality that bids no argument.

Arya’s mouth twitches into a lopsided half-smile.

“You’d better tell Gendry, then,” she says. “He’s already picked out a bunch of names that play on _Snow.”_

***

When Daenerys Targaryen gets a letter from her Wardeness of the East explaining the Starks’ predicament, her reply is perfectly civil, if absolutely bemused. 

_It would be my pleasure,_ she writes, _to legitimize the heir to Winterfell and the North, be they Stark or any other great house within my realm. I should, eventually, like to meet the child, although I understand if such is not possible for some time._

And as an obvious afterthought:

_Send my congratulations to the mother._

“The mother,” Arya spits. “‘The mother.’ She doesn’t even mention me by name. Let alone Gendry —”

“You understand why we can’t tell her about Gendry,” Sansa says tiredly.

“Not that he’s the son of a fucking usurper, no, but it wouldn’t kill either of you to drop a line about the man who knocked me up with the bloody bastard —”

“Language, Arya.”

“I’m not a lady, I can say as I like. And anyway, who does she think she is, demanding to have my babe carted down to King’s Landing for her to poke and prod at —”

“She thinks she’s Queen of the Seven Kingdoms,” Sansa says, pouring herself a glass of wine, “and she’s right.” 

Arya clamps her jaw shut sullenly and sits down, rubbing her stomach. “I don’t want her to steal it away,” she whispers, and all of a sudden the Faceless Man is gone. It’s just Sansa’s sister, small and stretched with child and very scared of what comes next.

“She will not,” Sansa decides.

“If she wants it, she will.”

“No,” Sansa repeats. “She will not.”

She has survived being in a Queen’s disfavor before, and that was without a cousin in the King’s seat and with her family in open rebellion against the crown. Sansa Stark will survive the disappointment of Daenerys Targaryen.

***

Jon Stark is born on a day as bright enough to blind clear-sighted men and cold enough to freeze them. When the goodwife lifts him out of his mother’s womb, he is silent, a placidity to his features that strikes terror into Sansa’s heart. But then he lets loose a scream to wake the dead, and she weeps with relief. 

Arya grasps for him. “Give him to me,” she insists. “Give him. Give him here —”

“He is bloody, milady, and needs bathing —”

“I’ve skinned the face from the corpse of a man whose heart I cut out with a dull knife,” Arya snarls. _“Give me my son.”_

The nurse hands the boy over like he’s burning her hands, and Sansa struggles not to laugh at the gruesome impropriety of it all. 

_Mother,_ she thinks, _Mother, what would you think of us? What would you think of another bastard son living under your roof?_

(Perhaps it is better that Catelyn Stark did not live to see her daughters’ fates.)

Arya cuddles the bloodied babe close to her chest. “Jon,” she coos. “Little Jon — get Gendry in here, I want him to meet his son.” Darkly, she adds, “And I’m going to put a sword through his cock, too, after _that_. Gods be good, Mother can’t have done this five times.”

“She said it got easier by the time Rickon came around,” Sansa offered.

“Well, I certainly don’t intend to find out.”

***

Gendry Waters looks at his son like he’s a summons from the Dragon Queen telling him to sit the throne. 

“Jon,” he says, a bit watery. “Little Jon, my Jon.” 

Sansa gracefully removes herself from the room when the two start staring at each other. Kissing, petting, that she could endure — but the looks they give each other, like they’d pluck the sun from the sky if the other asked it, are unendurable.

Did anyone ever look at Sansa like that? She cannot remember. She thinks that once, she might have believed Petyr Baelish did, but she knows that whatever she thought he felt was phantom and figment. 

(Sansa Stark is never lonely, exactly. Not surrounded by her people, in the Eyrie, or surrounded by her ladies, kind and gracious women all. Least of all when at Winterfell, among her family, sleeping in her childhood bed. But sometimes she feels a twinge, in her chest, and thinks about her mother, laying down in a bed beside a man who loved her, and her sister, sleeping on dirt floors and rotting leaves and Gods know what else, but always besides a man who loved her.) 

Bran smiles a real, genuine smile when Sansa tells him the name. 

“There’s another Jon Snow in Winterfell,” he says. “We must tell the King.” 

“That’s a smile,” Sansa gasps. “That’s a real, genuine — no, _don’t you hide it,_ I saw it. You were _pleased!”_

“I was unsurprised,” says Bran, but he’s still smiling.

“You didn’t look! You didn’t know!”

“I thought I would exercise restraint,” he says. “For Arya’s sake.”

She hugs him. “You’re digging into my legs,” he complains. “I can’t even feel my legs, Sansa, but you’re digging into them.” 

“We shall celebrate your miraculous recovery,” she says, muffled by his neck, and his guffaw is surprised. 

(Jon sends back a letter that’s half-indecipherable, letters blurred together and smudged, sketched out by a head five words ahead of where the hand was. There are some splotches on the page that look suspiciously like tears, and render the words even harder to make out. But he was careful to write the important words in large, bold script: _Thank you,_ and _Gods be good,_ and _Gods bless you, thank you, Arya_ all appear several times throughout the letter.)

***

An official decree by Daenerys Targaryen arrives a day later, naming Jon Stark heir presumptive to Winterfell and the North. “He was a Snow for less than twenty-four hours,” Arya complains. “He didn’t see a sunset before she stuck a title on him.”

“Jon probably didn’t let her have a moment’s rest until she did it,” Sansa points out. “He’d want his nephew legitimized as soon as possible, so he could dote on him in public.” 

She chooses the word ‘nephew’ with care. As soon as it leaves her lips, Arya beams. 

“He’ll have to come visit often,” she decides, settling back into the bed. The babe suckles at her, quiet with contentment. “Now he’s an uncle.” 

“I think Daenerys probably had to hold him by his cape to keep him from riding North, when he heard you’d come back,” Sansa says, eliciting another broad smile. “Now you’ve gone and named a babe after him. There’ll be no keeping him away, after this.” 

“Yes,” she says. “Well. Everyone’s going around calling him Aegon, and s _omeone_ had to put a Jon back in Winterfell. I have to do everything my damn self.” 

“Language. You’ve got a babe,” Sansa scolds, and Arya rolls her eyes, but for once, she minds the order. If Catelyn were alive, Sansa thinks, she would think it a miracle. 

(If Catelyn were alive, she would scowl and scoff over her grandson being named Jon Stark, but, Sansa thinks, she wouldn’t fight Arya over it. Not when Arya had gone and done what everyone else thought unthinkable, what anyone with half a brain would swear she’d never do.)

***

Sansa departs for the Eyrie when Jon is six months old. She wants to stay longer, but a kingdom needs its Lady, and she has ruled in absence for long enough. 

To her surprise, it is Arya who protests her leaving most fiercely. 

“What do they need you for,” she cries. “They survived Sweetrobin, they could rule themselves!” 

“I am Lady Paramount of the Vale,” Sansa says, doing her best not to provoke, “nominated for the purpose of serving as Lady Paramount of the —”

“Hang the Vale,” says Arya. “Your family’s _here.”_

Sansa bites her cheek. 

“It’s not as simple as that,” she says. 

“It could be.” Arya stands. She’s worked the leftover fat from the pregnancy away with swordfighting, in the months since the birth, but there’s still something soft left to the curves of her, something Sansa remembers from her mother’s own pregnancies.

“That’s your problem,” she says. “You and all the lords, all the ladies, all the nobles in Westeros. You all think it’s so complicated because you don’t realize it doesn’t need to be. All those fancy rules and expectations you’re afraid of breaking. Who’s making you follow them?”

“Not everyone can run off and be Braavosi swordswomen, Arya,” Sansa laughs, and winces at the way she sounds.

Arya’s eyes narrow. “No,” she says. “But anyone could try.”

(When Sansa was a girl, she overheard her mother and father talking about Arya. As it was most of the time, her mother was complaining, but it wasn’t about anything that Arya did. They were wondering about the steel in her, the iron backbone. Neither of them could tell where it came from; her mother was firm, but not unbendable, and her father, bless him, could usually be swayed with a kiss or a soft plea, unless it was on a matter of some importance. Perhaps it came from the same place that the old widows said Lyanna’s wildness did: not from her sire, but from the wild North winds sneaking through the window on her mother’s birthing bed.)

“I’ll write the Lord Regent,” Sansa says, instead of answering. 

***

Eventually, she does end up going back to the Eyrie. She cannot bring herself to abdicate her seat of power, not after fighting tooth and nail for it, not after giving years of her life to the people of the Vale and their sweet, toothless customs. 

(Sansa does not love them like she loves the North, like she loves the Northerners, and she knows she never will. But that does not mean she cannot love them, all the same.)

Perhaps this is her flaw, as it was Petyr Baelish’s before her: she likes power. She likes the way it feels on her tongue when she calls for something to be done, likes the way it looks in the curl of her signature and likes the way it smells in the wax when she stamps the Arryn sigil on a finished letter. She likes the way it looks when a maid pins a jewel around her neck, and when someone bows to her.

(As a child, Sansa Stark wanted to be a queen. As a woman grown, those dreams linger, although she has downsized her expectations.)

During her time at Winterfell, Petyr and Cersei left her completely. She went so far as to hope they were gone for good. Alone again, in the Eyrie, they both return, popping up in empty rooms, shadows flickering in open doors.

***

Sometimes, when she is tired, and her judgement is not its best, she summons Littlefinger to talk to her.

(She does not mean to. She tries to keep him away, as much as possible, as much as she can. But sometimes, the Eyrie is a very lonely place, all this way above the ground.)

_Sweet Sansa,_ he says. _You could have stayed at Winterfell, if you hated it here so._

“I don’t hate it here.” 

_You’re speaking to me._

“I’m speaking to myself,” she says. “The part of me that looks like you.”

_And what part is that?_

“The worst part, probably.”

_So what part, then, is Cersei Lannister?_

“The hateful part.” 

_A more specific title than you gave me._

“You’re the cowardly part,” she says. “Distinct, but equally terrible.” 

_I was not cowardly._

“Yes, you were,” she laughs. “That was how you survived.”

_Then you should be proud that a part of you is keeping you alive._

“You didn’t keep me alive,” she says. “I kept me alive.” 

***

She hears of Jon’s growth through ravens, and attached sketches; in return, she sends portraits of herself, of pretty corners of the Vale, and piles caravans high with presents for her young nephew. Jon Stark, like Sansa Stark before him, grows up with an aunt in the Eyrie. Jon’s, however, does not have a son to spoil herself, and so devotes all her attentions to him.

Arya leaves when her son is twelve, called away by ‘business in the Capitol.’ She takes Gendry with her, because Sansa thinks the two would probably combust if they were ever apart, and leaves Jon in Bran’s care. Sansa’s consequent exchange with her sister is heated, and carried out over the course of three weeks and innumerable ravens.

Arya comes back to Winterfell. Jon sees his mother again. 

Then she begins taking trips away, and Sansa resigns herself to the fact that Arya was never going to be a stable maternal figure, nursing her children as Dowager Queen of some castle or keep. Sansa takes more frequent trips to Winterfell to compensate, although as her age climbs, so too does the journey’s length seem to. 

On her fifty-fifth nameday, Sansa Stark realizes that she has tired of the Vale, and that she will die soon.

Time has been kind to her, but not kind enough to forestall the inevitable. Drafty windows have let cold into her bones while she sleeps, and she has spent many years breathing thin mountain air. The Maesters are unwilling to prescribe a change in climate, for they are unwilling to send away their Lady Paramount, but she knows how to treat old age. She watched her oldest relatives deal with it themselves. 

(She feels honored, in a way, to have the privilege of dying of old age. She thinks of her father, of her mother, of Robb, of Rickon, and hopes that the rest of her family will die the same way. She is grateful, too, to be the first among the remainder to die. She never wants to lose a family member again.)

(Ironic, that the Gods choose to be kind to her now, as if hastily trying to compensate for her youth.)

Watching the lords of the Vale bicker over some matter she stopped caring about an hour ago — she thinks it was grain storage, she’s not sure — she lifts herself from the seat. Her bones feel heavy. 

“Call a carriage,” she says. “I am going to Winterfell.” 

***

The lords of the Vale bicker furiously over the line of succession while she makes arrangements for her departure. When one of them finally thinks to ask the Lady Paramount for her opinion on the matter, she reward him by giving it to him.

(His name is Andar Royce, and she chose him precisely because he always was the kind of person to ask for her opinion on matters of importance. Lord Royce almost falls through the damn moon door when she hands him the falcon brooch.)

Then, she doesn’t stick around to deal with the fallout. She’s spent forty years dealing with lords’ poor decisions. Let them deal with hers.

***

Jon Stark is fifteen, and a man grown. His hair is unreasonably long and unruly, tangling behind his neck in thick black knots that evoke his Uncle Brandon, and his eyes are clear, cold blue. He greets her with a warm cry of “Aunt Sansa!” and a kiss to the cheek, and helps her out of the carriage. “You should have sent a raven,” he says. “I would have arranged a welcome party.” 

“That,” she says, “is precisely why I did not send a raven. It’s unreasonable fuss.” 

“We like to honor our visitors, here in the North,” he laughs, and she reaches up and tweaks his ear.

“Careful, boy,” she says. “I was a Northerner before you.” 

***

Bran has grown a beard.

“Shave that off,” she says, flinging herself into the chair opposite him. He’s sequestered himself in the lord’s chambers, surrounded himself by books and nice furs and a roaring fireplace, and according to the staff, he only comes out a few times a week. It infuriates her to see him lock himself away like this, but she’ll tackle that issue another day. 

“Sansa,” he says, bewildered, blinking out of his trance. “You’re here.”

“Oh, that was good. Have you been practicing?”

“I’m not pretending.” He scratches his head. “You weren’t supposed to come.”

“I don’t know if you’re grown forgetful in your old age, Brandon Stark,” she says wryly, “but I told you a long time ago that I’d die in Winterfell.” 

“So you did,” he says, and smiles. 

It’s a real smile. It’s her brother’s smile. 

They hold hands and watch the fire die, and not once does he slip away into someone else’s mind. 

***

Her last days at Winterfell are her best.

She watches Jon shoot his bow, and watches him, with his uncle’s unflagging talent, miss the target every single time. She rides with him in the fields around Winterfell, and listens to the yapping of direwolves at night. She eats lemoncakes every day and refuses to take nightshade for sleep, unwilling to yield a single hour of the time she has left unconscious. 

The illness comes to take her two months after she returns home. 

Her breath starts aching in her lungs, and her throat hurts when the air brushes against it. She retires to her chambers, her childhood chambers, where Mother would sit with her when she was ill. Brandon comes to talk to her. She thinks he does this just so she is not alone, when it happens. She does not appreciate the gesture any less for its transparent motive. She appreciates it especially, coming from him.

She lies back on her furs and listens to the snow collect on the roof. Icicles fall, one by one, from the eave of her windowsill. _The thaw is coming,_ she thinks. 

Brandon’s thumb strokes her hand.

“There won’t be any pain,” he tells her. “When you go.”

“Ah.” She evades his eyes. “Will Jon be here? Will Arya?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“You shouldn’t have asked that question.”

“I know.” 

She tilts her head back.

“Is it coming soon?”

“I don’t know what ‘soon’ means.” 

“Will I be frightened?”

“I can’t tell you how you’ll feel,” he says. “Only what happens.”

She looks at him.

“You be good,” she warns him, summoning everything she can of her mother’s commands. “You be kind to Jon, and take care of him. His parents love him, but he needs someone to teach him how to live in a castle, how to run a kingdom. You do that. You show him my letters — and you get outside, once in a while, don’t spend all your time inside. It’s bad for your skin. That’s what killed some of the ancient kings — not enough time in the sun.” She coughs. “And you make Arya come home for holidays — make sure the Jon in King’s Landing doesn’t work himself to death, and if Daenerys ever oversteps her bounds, you just remind her that you’re a warg, and Rhaegal, for all his talents, is still an animal.”

“Shall I write this down?”

“Are you the Three-Eyed Raven or aren’t you? Ser I-Remember-Everything, indeed.” She coughs again, settling her head onto the pillow. “Bran Stark. If it didn’t involve dragons or wights, you’d have to use an awl to get it through his head.” 

Bran smiles.

“I’ll miss you,” he says. “I wish you’d been this ornery in your youth. You and Arya would have been great friends.”

“We were great friends,” she says. “In the end.”

Then Sansa Stark closes her eyes, squeezes her brother’s hand, and slips away. 

(When Sansa dies, both Littlefinger and Cersei are in the room. They say nothing, however. She has learned how to make them quiet.)


End file.
